“Ah, these musicians!  He wants saving from himself.  If he does not halt soon, he will be lost.  Pity!  A great talent!”

Gyp looked at her steadily and asked: 

“Does he drink, then?”

“Pas mal!  But there are things besides drink, ma chere.”

Instinct and so much life with Winton made the girl regard it as beneath her to be shocked.  She did not seek knowledge of life, but refused to shy away from it or be discomfited; and the baroness, to whom innocence was piquant, went on: 

“Des femmes—­toujours des femmes!  C’est grand dommage.  It will spoil his spirit.  His sole chance is to find one woman, but I pity her; sapristi, quelle vie pour elle!”

Gyp said calmly: 

“Would a man like that ever love?”

The baroness goggled her eyes.

“I have known such a man become a slave.  I have known him running after a woman like a lamb while she was deceiving him here and there.  On ne peut jamais dire.  Ma belle, il y a des choses que vous ne savez pas encore.”  She took Gyp’s hand.  “And yet, one thing is certain.  With those eyes and those lips and that figure, you have a time before you!”

Gyp withdrew her hand, smiled, and shook her head; she did not believe in love.

“Ah, but you will turn some heads!  No fear! as you English say.  There is fatality in those pretty brown eyes!”

A girl may be pardoned who takes as a compliment the saying that her eyes are fatal.  The words warmed Gyp, uncontrollably light-hearted in these days, just as she was warmed when people turned to stare at her.  The soft air, the mellowness of this gay place, much music, a sense of being a rara avis among people who, by their heavier type, enhanced her own, had produced in her a kind of intoxication, making her what the baroness called “un peu folle.”  She was always breaking into laughter, having that precious feeling of twisting the world round her thumb, which does not come too often in the life of one who is sensitive.  Everything to her just then was either “funny” or “lovely.”  And the baroness, conscious of the girl’s chic, genuinely attracted by one so pretty, took care that she saw all the people, perhaps more than all, that were desirable.

To women and artists, between whom there is ever a certain kinship, curiosity is a vivid emotion.  Besides, the more a man has conquered, the more precious field he is for a woman’s conquest.  To attract a man who has attracted many, what is it but a proof that one’s charm is superior to that of all those others?  The words of the baroness deepened in Gyp the impression that Fiorsen was “impossible,” but secretly fortified the faint excitement she felt that he should have remembered her out of all that audience.  Later on, they bore more fruit than that.  But first came that queer incident of the flowers.